Tuesday, 13 September 2016

The Castle of Torre dei Sicconi (Tower of the Sicconi clan) is situated on the foothills south of the village of Caldonazzo. It was founded in 1201.

The castle was destroyed by troops from Verona and Vicenza in 1385.The Cultural Heritage Department of Trento (office of archaeological heritage) has conducted excavations and restoration works between 2006 and 2008.

That data was used for a virtual reconstruction of how the castle may have looked like 600 years ago.

During the next weeks we will publish nine chapters of a movie we've made, explaining the long way from archaeological excavation to virtual reconstruction:

Torre dei Sicconi - Caldonazzo - Monte Rive -

The rebirth of a lost castle.

We start today with an appetizer: The 90 seconds long trailer of the project.

Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Just
a short post to spread the announcement of the recent release of two
R packages: rpostgis (see also here) and RQGIS (see also here and here).
The first facilitates transfer between
PostGIS "Geometry" objects (stored in PostgreSQL databases)
and R spatial objects; the latter
establishes an interface between R and QGIS
and allows the
user to access the manyQGIS geoalgorithms from within R.

I
tested them briefly and I think they are very useful tools to perform
and simplify statistical and geo-statistical analyses in
archaeological contexts. Here I
present a quick example of usage.

Firstly I imported a set of
archaeological site-points stored in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database.
That is very simple with rpostgis package: it's enough to create a
database connection (like in RpostgreSQL package) and launch the "pgGetGeom" function.

Then I
used RQGIS package to run (within R) the QGIS geoalgorithm that
builds a polygon from layer extent. After setting the same parameters
required by QGIS, the function "run_qgis" creates a red polygon
around the outermost points of my dataset.

Actually, must be careful to the version of QGIS we are using. With
2.14 there's no problem, but if you're using 2.16.1 or 2.16.2 (like
me) you must modify the QGIS file "AlgorithmExecutor.py" (path
for linux users should be: "/usr/share/qgis/python/plugins/processing/AlgorithmExecutor.py")
as described in the web page.
In the next future this problem should be correct by QGIS core
team.

At
the end I performed a specific point pattern analysis with the data
imported and created by
our two packages: in this example I calculated the Ripley's K
function (for an archaeological example see here)
in order to identify the distribution model
(random, regular or clustered) of my
archaeological sites.

In my
opinion these two new R packages make easier and faster the
traditional spatial analyses in R and facilitate a more virtuous
integration between GIS, geo-database and statistics.

Sunday, 4 September 2016

We have recorded hours of movies during our diving project in the Mandrone lake.
Later this year we will publish a video illustrating us while we are working over and under the water surface.
In the meantime we want to whet your appetite with just a few pictures...
Enjoy!